Printer Ink Cartridge Refills

Costly And Time-Consuming

by Aaron Rice (a.rice@ukonline.co.uk)
written 13 Mar 1996

This article is classified "Real"


Anybody in possession of an inkjet printer has, or will inevitably at
one time or another, run out of ink.  The symptoms of this are that your
documents will gradually fade as they print, perhaps to the point of being
totally invisible to all but those with amazingly developed imaginations.

At this point you will be faced with a decision:  to buy a new cartridge,
or to "save" money by purchasing a refill kit to refill the cartridge you
have with more ink.

To explain the situation: you can purchase two refills for just under the
price of one cartridge, one refill being theoretically sufficient to fill
one cartridge.  The idea here is that you are getting the equivalent of two
cartridges for less than the price of one.

This couldn't be more wrong, as, of course, cartridge manufacturing
companies have cottoned on to this idea of saving money with refills.  They create their cartridges
 in such a way as to prevent any refill from working,
at least until you've used the equivalent money's-worth of ink in trying.
By the time your cartridge actually starts to excrete ink onto your page as
intended, you have already used both refills, even having gone to the point
of watering down the second one!  Their theory is of course that, when you
need more ink yet again, you will not even think about buying anything other
than a brand new cartridge.

As a result of this, lots of ink cartridge manufacturers have of course
become immensely rich, and lots of ordinary printer-owning people have gone
insane.  Bah!

See also:
  • Computers, Earth
  • Computer Malfunctions
  • Self-Destructing Computers

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